Comment by mawadev

I highly agree. Let us stop talking about software dev and look behind the curtain a bit...

I want to point at the discouraging framing of developers who learn to be helpless whenever they are stuck in an organization for long enough where they start to believe they cannot do better and there is something that cannot be changed.

The majority of people I met started out in the former group but have been reshaped by the environment they are in.

If you are in the former group and find yourself turning into someone from the latter group, becoming unrecognizable to your past self, ask yourself if you have been reshaped by the organizational experience you were having and where that spark went.

The chance is very high the organization figured out how to keep you in your position or you have internalized things about your professional self at face value that do not depict reality outside the org and that start to affect deeper layers like your confidence and outlook.

You start to identify with the made up labels or arbitrary hurdles of reaching some next level that will change everything. Essentially you are in a box and you developed tunnel vision, could be dept, org, branch or industry wide.

Just bash your head against a project away from work for 3 months on the side and gauge for yourself how capable you are with no economic intention disregarding time and value investments and so on. Repeat this long enough to fill any gaps in knowledge you encounter and at some threshold the coin flips again.

You will do DevOps but you are no DevOps guy, you do Frontend but you are no Frontend guy. Just a free flowing human walking through the layers that create something real.

There is an art in unplugging yourself from economics and thinking in organizational hierarchies and patterns and I think if most of us see it for what it is, software would turn into a calmer place, grounded closer in reality.